I went for a lovely walk this afternoon and it reminded me how important our wild places are, especially at the moment. This is a piece on my local patch, first published Friday 9 October in The Guardian Country Diary.

Purwell Ninesprings, Hertfordshire

There’s a spring-fed sliver of alder carr shaped like a thought bubble near the source of the River Purwell. Before the pandemic, I volunteered here with the local wildlife trust and I’m often drawn back to this swampy woodland in search of solace and inspiration. Alongside the holloway that skirts the carr’s eastern edge, I learnt to lay a hedge, or ‘plash’ it to use an old Hertfordshire term. On a raised bank unceremoniously named The Dump, I’ve coppiced elder and hazel to allow light to reach the understorey and when life is too loud and angular, I sit with the mosses or settle in the sedges on the riverbank and watch the little egrets fly by, trailing their washing-up glove feet behind them.

As I dip into the wood on this hazy autumn morning, the lopsided basketry of the laid hedge looks familiar and welcoming. After several grim housebound weeks recovering from Lyme Disease, the act of walking into the carr feels like an exhalation, a gentle homecoming. In front of me, as if anticipating my return, the wood’s last surviving black poplar has lowered a drawbridge – a vast plank of riven bark, taller than a woman, now lying across the path. The top half has fractured, sending corky chunks drifting off into a sea of dog’s mercury and hedge woundwort like a disintegrating life raft. This poplar’s days are numbered; already the wood is reclaiming its bare trunk in alder, elder and bittersweet spirals.

Mired in glassy black pools at the heart of the carr, titanic common alders rise twenty metres above the water. I walk across the spongy woodland floor, picking my way warily through the marshy areas, leaving a fenny trail in my wake as each footprint fills behind me. In the waterlogged soil, alder roots are engaged in symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi and the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Frankia alni in a mutually beneficial exchange of nutrients. I rest my head against the nearest alder trunk, feel the rasp of lichen on my cheek. I stand rooted here for a long time, transfixed by the fecundity of life beneath my feet and its invisible impact on the superficial layer – the tip of the iceberg – that we call wood.

The sunshine has brought out the ladybirds on our snow-in-summer. Some hurry along the raised bed sleepers in between the silvery leaves, clearly preoccupied with ladybird business, while others doze and mate on the warm wood.

The kids have always enjoyed watching these charismatic beetles with their striking patterns and distinct spots, so we decided to focus on ladybirds for our garden school maths project (with a bit of art and natural history thrown in for good measure). Ladybirds emerge from hibernation during spring, so now is a great time to go on a ladybird hunt. There are over 40 species in the UK, although only 26 resemble what we would generally think of as ladybirds. The number of spots varies between the species from 2 to 24 – ideal as the basis for a range of garden equations. 

We started by learning about different species and drawing some of the different patterns so we’d be able to identify any ladybirds we found. Favourites included the 14-spot ladybird which we later found on the whitecurrant and the multi-coloured 10-spot ladybird.  Once we’d learnt a bit about the different species we might find in the garden, it was time to get calculating…

MATHS: CALCULATE AREA

• Choose a sunny afternoon when ladybirds are likely to be out and about. Begin by measuring the length and breadth of a border, garden or any green space that you have access to – in metres.

• Calculate the area of your space by multiplying the two numbers together, to find the area in m².
• Now measure out a m² quadrat in one section of your space (1m x 1m) or a smaller quadrat – maybe 0.25m² (0.5m x 0.5m) – if your space is restricted. Mark it out with bamboo canes or twine.

RECORD LADYBIRD NUMBERS

• Count all the ladybirds you can find in the quadrat and record by species on a tally chart. We also recorded ladybird larva, but not by species.
• Make a bar chart or pie chart to display the numbers and species.

• Work out how many quadrats there are in the whole space by dividing the total area by the area of your quadrat. Round up to the nearest m².
• Calculate the estimated number of ladybirds in your space by multiplying the number in the quadrat by the number of quadrats in the total space.

GET CREATIVE

• Of course, it’s possible that there are not many ladybirds in the quadrat or that those you find are all of one species. If this is the case, imagine some different scenarios such as:
  •  You find 10 two-spot ladybirds, 6 thirteen-spot ladybirds and 3 twenty-two spot ladybirds (feeding on the mildews on your herbaceous plants!) How does this change your calculations?
  •  What would happen if you find 12 ten-spot ladybirds, 9 five-spot ladybirds (you’ve clearly got a Welsh river running through the garden) and 4 beautiful yellow fourteen-spot ladybirds?
    

    Ladybirds emerge from the pupae without spots – these develop over the next few hours as the wing casing hardens

EXTENSION ACTIVITIES

• Consider the equations in terms of spots rather than individual ladybirds. How many ladybird spots are there in your total space?
• Complete the same exercise for the results above in blue and make up some of your own ladybird sums.
• Throw in a few non-native harlequin ladybirds just to mix things up a bit. They can have up to nineteen spots!
  

  Our completed ID chart

DEVELOP HABITAT

• Attract more ladybirds to your garden in future by building a bug hotel to give insects somewhere to shelter. 
• Avoid using pesticides in the garden – instead encourage natural predators like ladybirds, ladybird larva and blue tits that will eat problem insects such as aphids.
• Don’t be too tidy – overgrown areas, long grass and hollow stems left over winter are all beneficial habitats for ladybirds.
• The only disadvantage to creating an amazing habitat for ladybirds is that next year’s maths equations will be far more tricky!!!

For more garden schooling ideas – you can follow the blog below…

I’ll be posting another project soon and if you’d like to read about our last projects you can explore the Seed Sowing Challenge and Nature Spells lessons here:

Garden Schooling: From Small Seeds…

Garden Schooling: Nature Spells

 

Ripening in the garden this afternoon are the last of the ‘White Marseille’ figs (Ficus carica); the first, and therefore somewhat miraculous, harvest for 14 years. On either side of the fig are the fruiting canes of the pink, seedless ‘Reliance’ grape (Vitis vinifera) and in the front garden, a handful of Chilean guava (Ugni molinae) berries that survived the drought earlier in the year are developing their burgundy shine. The honeyberries (Lonicera caerulea) and pinkberries (actually a pink blueberry, Vaccinium ‘Pink Lemonade’) also fruited for the first time this year and there were a even couple of mulberries  on the juvenile ‘Charlotte Russe’ (developed from Morus rotundiloba), although I have to say I’m still unconvinced about their quality in terms of flavour.

We had a fair apple harvest from our espalier ‘James Grieve’ and ‘Egremont Russet’, although ‘Bountiful’ and ‘Fiesta’ sulked all spring and produced not one blossom. The plum (Prunus domestica ‘Opal’) had a successful year and the greengage (Prunus domestica subsp. italica ‘Cambridge Gage’) also produced a good harvest, although due to poor timing on our part we were away when the fruit ripened and on our return all that remained were a series of wasps’ bottoms poking provocatively out of each syrupy gage.

Quantity of Quince

But the delight of the year has been the success of our appealingly dishevelled quince tree (Cydonia oblonga), the aptly named ‘Meeches Prolific’. A couple of weeks ago, at five years old, it delighted us all with a harvest of around 100-150 small fruits, picked by my husband and daughter, each quince carefully handed down from the tree and placed reverently in a bucket which it soon became clear was far too small for the seemingly limitless supply hidden beneath the foliage. The quince harvest alone made my year in the garden complete. My only regret, fruit-wise, is the lack of space for that king of trees – the medlar.

Meeting Medlars

I first discovered medlars when I moved down to Hertfordshire in 2003. Until that moment my fruit aspirations went no further than childhood memories of my dad’s ‘Laxton’s Superb’ apple trees, bilberries foraged on the Welsh mountains and the loganberry – a fruit that attained an almost mythic status in my memory as the sweetest food on earth when eaten warm from Aunty Florence’s garden, the berries almost as big as my mouth. But I’d never encountered anything like the medlar. Here was a fruit that offered neither immediate candied delight, nor vibrant hues; a fruit whose dun, leathery skin seemed a deliberate indication of its disinclination to be eaten. I was intrigued.

The tree stood in the corner of my friends’ new garden – a modest, rather overgrown patch with unexpected treasures lurking at the back of each brimming border. Their area has a rich horticultural history: situated on the borders of a medieval park dating from before 1380, then developed into a town pleasure garden in the 18^th century. With the cottages and gardens themselves dating back to 1820s and 30s, theirs was a historically interesting garden with dynamic borders full of flowers and fruit – redcurrants, damsons, gooseberries, blackberries, quince, raspberries, rosemary, campanula, hollyhocks and clematis.

The garden in winter and with spring blossom (Image credit: Lindsay Cook)

I was attracted to the story behind this garden and the questions behind the design – who had planted with this balanced purpose of beauty and productivity – and what had the garden meant to them? Why had they chosen the majestic medlar as the cornerstone of the garden and what did they do with the fruits? The garden and its medlar tree ignited my interest in unconventional fruits and the stories that they can tell. We harvested the medlars in the garden for several years, bletting the fruits, watching the disintegration of the skins as the not-quite rotting took place and savouring the smoky date-apple flavours of the jellies and cheeses that we produced using methods that have been around for hundreds of years.

Ancient Fruit

Both quinces and medlars were once popular fruit in the UK. In 1629 John Parkinson, Royal Botanist to Charles I, lists three varieties of medlars and six of quince in his study of plant cultivation, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris. Gervase Markham (1568-1637) has advice for both ‘husbandmen’ and ‘housewives’ regarding storing and cooking these fruit. Husbandmen should ‘gather [medlars] about the midst of October after such time as the frost hath nipt and bitten them’ and lay them in ‘thicke woollen cloathe, and about the cloathes good store of hay, & someother waight of boards’ to heat them and bring them to a ‘perfect rottenesse.’ Quinces, on the other hand, should be stored away from other fruit ‘because their sent is so strong and piercing, that it will enter into any fruit, and cleane take away his naturall rellish’.

In The Well-Kept Kitchen, as well as advising housewives in matter of religion, temperance, dress sense and their knowledge of gardening, Markham also includes instruction in the art of  making quince conserve, preserve, cake, paste and marmalade. 200 years later Eliza Acton continues the tradition with her recipes for quince juice, custard, jellies and marmalade, whilst Isabella Beeton’s 1860s recipes for medlar jelly and mebrillo (quince cheese) are the ones we use in our kitchen today.

Soup Tales

Many years ago at university I bought Soup & Beyond by the New Covent Garden Soup Company – an exploratory cookery book for which we were required to ditch our student staples of chicken, pasta and cheese, and explore hitherto unknown ingredients like dill, lovage, buckwheat and buttermilk. One of the recipes for prince and pedlar soup looked intriguing, but I was at a loss to source the strange fruits so as I worked my way through the other recipes the prince and the pedlar remained uncooked, forgotten for the last twenty years. Yesterday, with huge piles of quince fragrantly ripening in boxes in the kitchen I remembered the old recipe and unearthed the soup book. 

Although we have a few foraged medlars they haven’t yet completely bletted, so this time I’ve substituted one of our Egremont Russet apples as suggested in the recipe:

Ingredients

50g (2oz) butter

575g (11b 5oz) quince (approx 3), peeled, cored and roughly chopped

1 russet apple, peeled, cored and roughly chopped (or bletted medlar – I’d use 3/4 and just add the flesh to the soup mix)

1 teaspoon tumeric

1.25 litres chicken stock

3 tablespoons single cream

2 egg yolks

salt and freshly ground pepper

Method

Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the quince, medlar and tumeric. Cook over a low heat for 10 minutes. Add the stock, bring to the boil and then turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Take off the heat and leave to cool.

Process in a liquidiser until smooth, then return to the pan. Beat the cream and egg yolks together, add a ladle full of soup to this mixture then pour into the soup. Cook gently over a low heat until the mixture thickens, stirring continuously. Season to taste.

From New Covent Garden Soup Company’s Soup & Beyond (1999)

The Taste of History

Supper is now served: a warm yellow soup with a silky texture and a mellow sweet and sour flavour that reminds me of parsnip and orange. I’ve made cheese bread, so we’re all sorted for the evening. Whether your taste is for soups, jellies, poached fruit, marmalade or membrillo, quinces and medlars have so much potential and they deserve to be remembered.

 

What are your favourite autumn fruit recipes? Do you have any special quince and medlar concoctions? If so, please leave me a comment so that I can try them too. Thank you.

 

When my godson was three his favourite foods were apples and peas: a predilection that I naively assumed was the norm for small children. As my son started on solid foods I offered him fruit and vegetables with enthusiastic expectations, only to find he cried when peas appeared on his plate and the concept of eating apple brought on sulking and tantrums.

Perplexed, I persevered – we sowed seeds together, pricked out tomato seedlings, watched apples swell and picked as many colourful crops as we could – yellow ‘Allgold’ raspberries, ‘Purple Haze’ carrots, ‘Pinkberry’ blueberries, deep red ‘Boltardy’ beetroot, striped ‘Green Tiger’ tomatoes and purple-podded ‘Blauwschokker’ peas.

Gradually he started trying a wider range of fruit and vegetables – it’s hard not to get excited about ripening tomatoes when you can remember pushing the seeds into moist compost with your fingers. That was over 5 years ago, and this week my daughter (6) decided she likes our homegrown beetroot and my son (now 9) ate one of our James Grieve apples whole – an unimaginable feat just a year ago. 

We have all benefited from growing food as a family. Each spring we choose our crops for the next growing season and from that moment, the anticipation begins. This February we made our choices and were soon surrounded by a colourful collection of seed packets from the Fun To Grow range, courtesy of Suttons Seeds. We began with Table Top Tomato, sowing the seeds almost immediately, then started off the delightfully alliterative Crocodile Cucumber, Mini Muncher Peas, spherical Bowling Carrots and the non-edible but nonetheless exciting Dancing Plant and Caterpillar Plant a few weeks later.

Recycling has been a family priority this year, so we began by making our own seed pots out of old newspaper. It’s a fun job and the kids quickly got the hang of wrapping the paper strips at just the right tension so they would slide off easily once the bottoms had been firmly secured.

Then we filled our pots with compost and read the seed packet instructions – learning about the varying depths, light conditions and germination temperatures that different seeds require. 

Once the pots were labelled, we counted the days until germination and slowly but surely tiny shoots and seed leaves began to appear. The appearance of new growth, that magical emergence, fills cold spring days with joy for adult gardeners – so what a wonderful experience for young children for whom the world is naturally filled with enchantment. 

In late spring we planted the Crocodile Cucumbers into a couple of broken buckets, the Table Top Tomatoes went in the greenhouse with the Caterpillar Plants, and the Mini Muncher Peas and Bowling Carrots began developing in the vegetable beds.

We ate peas fresh from the pod throughout June and the tomatoes are still being picked and ripening in the greenhouse. The cucumbers have produced so many fruit that we’ve had enough for tzatziki – another first for the kids, declared ‘delicious’ and requested as a regular dip with pitta and olives. 

The Caterpillar Plants have bloomed all summer in the greenhouse – tiny yellow flowers which have turned into the eponymous caterpillars curled back on their stems, providing seeds for sowing next year. The Sensitive Plants didn’t germinate, so no scientific experiments to test whether the foliage responds to our touch this year. But it’s good that the kids experience growing failures as well as successes – one of the realities of working with nature.

Growing our own crops has, without doubt, had a positive effect on the way my kids approach what’s on their plates. But learning about how plants grow, how they provide for us and for wildlife, goes deeper than this. Such experiences help to form lifelong relationships with nature and develop an understanding of its fundamental role in our lives – providing us with enjoyment, wonder and the food upon which we rely.

I can’t believe it’s already time to decide which bulbs to grow next spring. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally managed to whittle the current list down to ten – based on the most reliable, perennial and beautiful varieties we’ve grown in the past 15 years…

1. ‘Ballerina’

One of my favourite tulips with its perennial nature, such a feisty colour and the way its shape and hue changes as it matures. Initially almost red, it matures to a bright orange with red stripes down the middle of each petal. It looks stunning on its own, for example as an edging plant in these images taken at Capel Manor gardens…

It thrives in my gravel garden despite clay soil, although I do plant all of my tulips with a handful of gravel beneath each bulb. I combine ‘Ballerina’ with ‘Queen of Night’ in the front gravel garden. In the back flowerbed it blooms alongside ‘Purple Prince’, ‘Queen of Night’ and blue forget-me-nots and never fails to lift my spirits when I see it emerging in the spring.

The versatile ‘Ballerina’ thrives in the back garden, front garden and in pots

2. ‘Swan Wings’

Generally I favour simple shapes and colours with my tulips, but I photographed ‘Swan Wings’ years ago at RHS Wisley and have always wanted to grow it. Maybe this year’s the year…

3. ‘Queen of Night’

I love deep purple/black flowers and foliage; I use them in my garden and my work as often as I can. I’ve been growing ‘Queen of Night’ for years and find it reliably perennial. It combines well with lighter purple and orange tulips, but also looks stunning with white or off-white bedding plants. It works well combined with wallflower ‘Ivory White’.

4. ‘Mistress Mystic’

Combining style and subtlety, ‘Mistress Mystic’ has a vintage allure and charm all of her own. We grew this in the allotment last year; it lasted well in arrangements and worked beautifully with other soft white, green and pink tulips.

5. ‘Prinses Irene’

Possibly one of the most beautiful tulips we’ve ever grown, ‘Prinses Irene’ is a subtle, understated winner. They thrived in pots and we’ve also been impressed by  ‘National Velvet’ which we grow alongside and which has a superb colour and sheen.

‘Prinses Irene’ and ‘National Velvet’

6. ‘Purissima’

Another favourite is ‘Purissima’ with its white/cream flowers which open up to dinner-plate size in the sun. It is a reliably perennial tulip and has lasted several years in big pots in the garden.

In pots with wild strawberries at the back and with mixed muscari at the front

7. ‘Shirley’

‘Shirley’ was the only tulip in the first garden I owned, although I didn’t know its name at the time. I loved its soft markings and photographed it in wonder. I think it’s about time I grew it again…

‘Shirley’ in my first ever garden

It looks great in a pot (with ‘Jackpot’) or in borders (with ‘Paul Scherer’ at the back)

8. ‘Purple Prince’

We grew ‘Purple Prince’ a few years ago to create a purple accent against the orange of ‘Ballerina’ and dark purple of ‘Queen of Night’, then decided we preferred the orange and dark purple on their own and marked the ‘Purple Prince’ tulips so we could remove the bulbs after flowering. Two years on they are still appearing en masse in the flowerbed so we’ve decided they can stay, especially when this serendipitous combination appeared as ‘Purple Prince’ emerged in front of the foliage of the Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’. 

9. ‘Zurel’

When we moved into my current house 6 years ago there was a purple and white rembrandt tulip in a border we had to remove to make room for the apple espaliers. We replaced it the next year with ‘Zurel’ – a striking, upbeat tulip. Unfortunately the bulbs didn’t reappear – probably because we overwintered the pineapple sage (which was sharing the same pot) in the greenhouse and they dried out. The area at the end of the vegetable beds hasn’t looked the same and we definitely need to get our stripes back.

 10. ‘Slawa’

For maximum impact in the garden and in a vase, ‘Slawa’ doesn’t disappoint. It grew well in the allotment cutting patch and its rich two-toned flowers added a bit of spice to all my spring arrangements.

More tulip images from my albums which have me reaching for the catalogues…

Which tulips can’t you be without and which new ones have bewitched you? Leave me a comment so I can make my wish list even longer  😉

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In 2012, Oxford University Press removed around 50 nature words from the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, replacing them with technological terms such as ‘chatroom’, ‘attachment’ and ‘broadband’. As Robert MacFarlane writes in his extraordinary celebration of the language of landscape and natural life, Landmarks, ‘for blackberry, read BlackBerry‘. These substitutions reflect changing times, with three-quarters of children now spending less time in the natural environment than prison inmates. The OJD word lists are taken from data compiled from children across the country and highlight the way experiences in nature are disappearing from many young lives. Without the vocabulary to describe a bluebell or wren, how can we expect the next generation to recognise, value and conserve the natural world for the future?

One way to engage kids with the natural world over the summer holidays is to take part in campaigns such as Plantlife’s Great British Wildflower Hunt. It’s always fun to search for species to tick off – I remember many happy hours with the I-Spy books as a child – and it’s a way for adults and children to work together, sharing experiences and knowledge. When adults communicate their passion for nature to children some of the magic inevitably rubs off. I was reminded of the potency of inspiration last autumn when I asked the question ‘What began your love of gardening?’ Of the 200 or more responses, almost all began with tales of a grandparent, parent or family friend who took the time to share their love for the gardening and natural world.

Plantlife outlines two compelling reasons why we should spend more time on our hands and knees exploring the world of wildflowers close up. Firstly, wildflowers are beautiful. Yesterday, while walking in a local nature reserve with my dad, we spotted some hedge woundwort (Stachys sylvatica). It’s a tall but modest plant in the mint family, but on closer inspection the tiny hooded flowers, circling the stem in whorls, have intricate white patterning on the deep red-purple lower lips which reminded me of the elaborate markings on orchid labella.

Secondly, Plantlife reminds us of the undeniable, but often overlooked fact that ‘wildflowers are vital to our planet. So much depends on them – bees, butterflies and us.’ As many of us are aware, in the past century we have lost 97% of our wildflower meadows, species-rich grasslands which were 6,000 years in the making. As these habitats disappear, they take with them populations of wildflowers like bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and bee orchids (Ophrys apifera), and native grasses like sheep’s fescue (Festuca ovina) and soft brome (Bromus hordeaceus). 

Getting involved in the Great British Wildflower Hunt is easy. You can choose to search in a town or city, or in the countryside – there are different resources for each location. The Wildflower Hunt materials include activities for families and there are spotter sheets to download. Results can be submitted online and even if you don’t manage to find any wildflowers on your hunt, it doesn’t matter. All data is valuable to build a picture of the state of wildflower populations in the UK.

Last year, from the Channel Islands to the Orkney Islands, more than 15,200 wild flowers were spotted by the British public. 15% of participants started out saying they couldn’t name any wildflowers and were ‘unsure’ of their identification abilities, but they completed the hunt which was a fantastic achievement.  At the other end of the scale, thirteen hunters scored a full house, finding all the species on their spotter sheets and scoring the maximum 37 points.

So do something special this summer and take a walk on the wildflower side. I’m looking forward to getting out and about, exploring new sites on our holidays and adding our records to Plantlife’s database. Hopefully our sightings will be a small step along the route to conserving our native flora and I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun along the way.

Featured image photo credit: Nicola Acketts

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